Neil Patrick Harris is starring in new advertisements for Heineken, helping the beer brand infuse more humor into its ad campaign.

Harris appears in a 15-second TV teaser and a two-minute video posted online as part of a Weiden + Kennedy New York campaign. As to be expected, Harris is pretty hilarious in the clips, promising a money-back guarantee for buying the brew (a real deal in some states).

In the two-minute version, Harris is accosted at a grocery store by workers who all know the actor as the “Heineken guy,” much to his chagrin:

Heineken USA vice president Ralph Rijks spoke with Adweek about the commercials, which push Heineken Light:

According to the Consumer Edge Insights’ Beverage DemandTracker, we found that 40 percent of 21- to 27-years-olds desire light beer with a more full-flavored taste. To meet consumer demand for fuller-flavored beers, Heineken reformulated the brew with Cascade hops in 2013, which are particularly beneficial in enhancing the taste and give it a fuller flavor, crisper aftertaste and a clean finish, yet we’ve preserved the easy-to-drink, effervescent, low-calorie beer that Heineken Light drinkers love.

The company announced Tuesday a decision to make “organizational changes” in order to boost delivery, according to a release. “The changes will allow the business to better focus on growth opportunities, to be more agile in responding to consumer needs in the marketplace and be more cost effective in doing so,” the company announced.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/03/31/neil-patrick-harris-heineken/feed/0Celebrities Visit "Late Show With David Letterman" - March 30, 2015snyderfortuneNew SeaWorld ads take on ‘lies’ about its killer whale showshttp://fortune.com/2015/03/23/seaworld-launches-ad-campaign/
http://fortune.com/2015/03/23/seaworld-launches-ad-campaign/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 22:15:23 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1049061]]>SeaWorld Entertainment has introduced a new ad campaign as the struggling theme park operator tries to boost disappointing attendance and counter criticism by animal rights groups about its captive killers whales and dolphins.

The ads, which started appearing in print publications Monday, feature SeaWorld’s veterinarians and researchers defending the care of the orcas kept at the company’s parks while refuting attacks by animal rights groups like the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Those organizations have waged campaigns in recent years aimed at shutting down SeaWorld by encouraging a boycott of the theme parks.

“There’s been a lot of misinformation and even lies spread about SeaWorld, and we recognize that it has caused some people to have questions about the welfare of killer whales in human care,” SeaWorld’s chairman and interim CEO David D’Allesandro said in a statement. “This long-term campaign will address those questions head on. We want to provide the facts, so people can make up their own minds on this important issue.”

SeaWorld’s reputation has suffered since the release of the 2013 documentary Blackfish, which accused the company’s theme parks of mistreating its orcas while adding fuel to the debate over whether or not marine mammals should be kept in captivity. Last summer, SeaWorld reacted to the public criticism by announcing it would build larger enclosures for its orcas.

On Monday, SeaWorld said its new ad campaign would look to rebut critics’ claims that orcas in captivity have shorter lifespans than those in the wild. The first of those ads, titled “Fact: Whales live as long at SeaWorld,” cited various independent reports claiming that the life-span of orcas born at SeaWorld’s parks are in-line with those born in the wild.

SeaWorld’s ad campaign, which will eventually include television commercials, will also serve to highlight the company’s plan to commit $10 million to the study of endangered whales in the wild, the company said Monday.

The new ad campaign represents SeaWorld’s latest attempt at revitalizing what has been a flagging business. Last week, the company announced the hiring of its new CEO: Joel Manby, former president and CEO of Herschend Enterprises, the country's largest family-owned theme park operator. Manby will take over for interim CEO D’Allesandro in early April.

Previous CEO Jim Atchison stepped down earlier this year after five years on the job. Atchison’s exit came amid declining attendance numbers at SeaWorld’s theme parks and a series of sub par quarterly financial results.

Following last week’s CEO announcement from SeaWorld, PETA’s senior vice president, Lisa Lange reiterated some of the animal rights group’s criticisms of the theme park. “Orcas belong in the ocean with their families, not in small concrete tanks, swimming in endless circles for years on end,” Lange said in a statement.

SeaWorld’s stock rose slightly Monday afternoon. The company’s shares SEAS have dipped nearly 40% over the past year, but have seen moderate gains since the company hired Manby last week.

Watch more business news from Fortune:

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/03/23/seaworld-launches-ad-campaign/feed/0Some aquariums scaling back amid controversyhuddlestontomHow Google is about to change the TV business foreverhttp://fortune.com/2015/03/23/google-fiber-tv-ads/
http://fortune.com/2015/03/23/google-fiber-tv-ads/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 18:05:29 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1048797]]>Google is hoping to bring its ad tracking technology from the web to televisions, potentially changing the future of the ad business.

The tech giant is starting a trial of its new service in Kansas City, tracking the ad views of every house with a Google Fiber box. Google Fiber is the company’s division that provides Internet and television to various locales around the country. It first became available in 2012 in Kansas City, and has since expanded to other cities. Bigger cities, including Atlanta, are set to become Google Fiber markets soon.

From a Google Fiber blog post:

Fiber TV ads will be digitally delivered in real time and can be matched based on geography, the type of program being shown (eg, sports or news), or viewing history. You can opt out of seeing ads that are based on viewing history from the Fiber TV settings.

If you're a local business in Kansas City, just as with digital ads, you'll only pay for ads that have been shown, and can limit the number of times an ad is shown to a given TV.

If the trial proves successful, it could mean huge changes for the advertising business. Instead of aiming for broad demographics by placing ads on TV shows that demographic is likely to watch, local businesses could target the exact television viewers who are most likely to respond to their ads.

Delta’s latest 60-second spot tugs at the heart strings. In the ad, which was created by Wieden + Kennedy New York, a businessman is shown as world-weary from travel. Nothing’s goes right: His hotel key won’t work. The food is strange. He misses his family. He gets lost. It goes on and on. And then he boards his Delta flight home…

Delta’s latest advertising campaign comes a little over a month after the company reported Q4 earnings on Jan. 20. Operating revenue increased 6%, or $571, year-over-year, according to the company in an earnings release. Like others in the airline industry, Delta is benefiting from the lower fuel costs. Delta’s CEO, Richard Anderson, highlighted that in a December statement:

As we begin 2015, we have a significant opportunity from lower fuel prices, which will drive more than $2 billion in fuel savings over 2014. Through our capacity discipline, pricing our product to demand, and the fuel savings, we expect to drive double-digit earnings growth, along with increased free cash flow and a higher return on invested capital in the upcoming year.”

Delta’s president, Ed Bastian, said the company gained “headwinds from the stronger dollar and lower fuel prices” in a statement.

The German-language ad was meant to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Coca-Cola’s fruit-flavored Fanta soft drinks. The ad explains Fanta came about because Coca-Cola’s German bottlers couldn’t get access to soda syrup. However, it failed to explain why that shortage existed: Trade embargoes against Nazi-era Germany.

The ad was met with criticism online because it claimed it wanted to bring “the Good Old Times back,” as translated by The Express. Some took that as an offensive reference to the Nazi regime.

A Coca-Cola spokeswoman told The Express that although Fanta was invented during World War II, “the 75-year-old brand had no association with Hitler or the Nazi Party."

Coke’s controversial ad comes after JetBlue recently apologized for a tweet that referenced the Hindenberg disaster, an airship crash that left 36 dead in 1937.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/03/03/coke-fanta-ad/feed/0San Francisco Board Of Supervisors Proposes Putting Soda Tax On Nov. BallotsnyderfortuneFacebook gained 33% more advertisers over the past 6 monthshttp://fortune.com/2015/02/24/facebook-gained-33-more-advertisers-over-the-past-6-months/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/24/facebook-gained-33-more-advertisers-over-the-past-6-months/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2015 14:28:41 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1003693]]>Facebook said on Tuesday that its active advertisers rose to 2 million, a 33% increase from the 1.5 million it had in July 2014.

The vast majority of the advertisers, defined as those that have placed an ad on the social media platform in the last 30 days, represent small- and medium-sized business owners.

“Small business owners are really hard to reach and they are not tech savvy usually,” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said in an interview. She added that 30 million small business owners have Facebook pages.

Facebook FB also launched a mobile app for advertisers to use to manage their campaigns.

Of Facebook’s newly acquired advertisers in the 2014 fourth quarter, 80% started by paying for a promoted post.

Facebook does not break out the actual number of small business advertisers versus big brands, but they tend to spend on average $5 to $50 a day. That compares to the millions spent annually by big companies.

Sandberg said that the fastest areas of growth of small business advertising are in regions of Europe-Middle East-Africa and Asia Pacific.

Getting more advertisers onto its platform is critical for Facebook as it tries to increase global share. Facebook’s fourth-quarter revenue grew 49% to $3.85 billion from the same period a year ago, with mobile accounting for 69% of advertising revenue.

Google GOOG is the worldwide leader in digital advertising market share, at 31.1%, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer. But Google’s slice has shrunk slightly, down from 33.6% in 2013.

Facebook, on the other hand, increased its share to 7.8% in 2014 from 5.8% in 2013, according to eMarketer.

It is unknown how many advertisers Google currently has. In 2007, it said it was used by 1 million advertisers.

Padraig Bracken, marketing manager at Y-Volution, a Dublin-based toy company that makes scooters for kids, said he plans to spend 60% of his digital marketing budget with Facebook this year.

“Facebook is pushing a lot harder than Google,” he said. “Google search is the king but it’s getting more expensive.”

Kay Martinovic, who owns Kay’s Designer Consignment in Ormond Beach, Florida, said that it is so easy to target potential customers that she trimmed her spend with the platform to $4,200 in 2014 from $9,000 in 2013.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/24/facebook-gained-33-more-advertisers-over-the-past-6-months/feed/0Most Admired 2015 — FacebooklorenzettifortuneWhy Snapchat is worth $19 billion (or more)http://fortune.com/2015/02/19/snapchat-worth-19-billion-more/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/19/snapchat-worth-19-billion-more/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 13:39:02 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=997068]]>An executive--his/her name isn’t important to this tale--stopped by Fortune‘s New York headquarters sometime last week. At one point during our conversation, Snapchat came up.

“You see what Snapchat’s doing lately?”

“No. I try to limit the number of messaging apps on my phone. Late adopter.”

The enthusiasm was infectious. (And no, the executive didn’t work for the company in question.)

On Wednesday news broke that Snapchat was reportedly raising a new round of funding that would value the Los Angeles company at $19 billion. It’s an astounding figure if you think about it--a few billion short of the current market value of Tesla Motors TSLA, Elon Musk’s groundbreaking electric car company, and ahead of Symantec SYMC, by some estimates the world’s leading cyber security company. It would make Snapchat the third-most valuable tech startup that does not trade its shares publicly. (To see a comprehensive list of those companies, visit the Fortune Unicorn List.)

When the news broke, the first question that usually arose was some form of the following: “Nineteen billion dollars for a disappearing-messaging app?” Translation: All this for a stupid mobile app that teenagers use as a back channel to goof off with their friends?

In a word, yes.

Snapchat, which launched in 2011, reportedly generates little revenue and has yet to turn a profit. But the broad strokes of its business model are well-worn: marshal a captivated audience, sell advertisements against it, profit.

The latest reports put Snapchat’s user base at more than 100 million people, though the exact number has not been publicly disclosed and could be well beyond that. Compare that to LinkedIn’s roughly 200 million (LNKD market cap: about $33 billion), Twitter’s almost 300 million (TWTR: about $30 billion), and Facebook’s 1.4 billion (FB: $212 billion) and the math--preposterous as it seems--starts to make sense.

(It also shows how aggressive Facebook has been in preserving its lead: It paid $19 billion for WhatsApp, which has about 700 million users, and $1 billion for Instagram, which now has more than 300 million.)

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has already indicated that his company is beginning to get serious about revenue; he said as much at an industry conference in October. If the company can demonstrate that it can figure out a way to make money at least as well as its peers--never mind the fact that its customers are almost entirely within the age 18-34 demographic that advertisers have traditionally most coveted--$19 billion isn’t a goal; it’s practically a done deal.

In a new series of ads, the company is pushing its Kraft Macaroni and Cheese as packed with protein, according to Adweek.

The 30-second spot “Pots Galore” (see above) features a man stirring up a hefty portion of the yellow stuff. He cites the product’s protein content as the reason behind not cooking anything else for dinner.

“[The ads are] about making sure that these parents have the nutritional reassurance they need to feel better about serving Kraft Mac and Cheese,” Sara Braun, a senior marketing director on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, told Adweek.

She said that the amount of protein in a serving of Kraft’s mac and cheese isn’t anything new -- the new ads are just about boosting consumer awareness.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/17/kraft-mac-cheese-protein-ad/feed/0Food Name Game Kraft macaroni and cheese 2011snyderfortuneTwitter takes first step to make money from Vinehttp://fortune.com/2015/02/11/twitter-vine-niche/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/11/twitter-vine-niche/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 22:59:36 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=986763]]>Twitter now has a plan to make money on Vine, the video app it acquired three years ago.

The social media company has acquired Niche, a start-up that helps land endorsement deals for the emerging celebrities on the service. According to a person familiar with the situation, the deal was worth $45 to $50 million, including earn-outs.

In case you've never heard of Vine, here's one way to think of it: Vine is to Twitter as Instagram is to Facebook - it's a hip social network that skews young and has created its own set of celebrities. Like with Twitter, brevity is the theme: Clips are limited to 6 seconds.

Marketers are increasingly enlisting prominent Vine users to showcase their products. A number of ad platforms and talent agencies, including Niche, connect the two worlds.

By acquiring Niche, Twitter TWTR will be able to rustle up revenue on Vine, which had no way of monetizing its users before now. (More than 100 million people view Vine videos across the Web each month.) The deal also creates interesting implications for the way social media networks interact with the stars they've created.

On one hand, YouTube, Tumblr or Instagram would be nothing without their users creating the content for them and drawing millions of eyeballs to see their work. That's why many of the services pay emerging stars to be exclusive to their services, and prohibit them from taking their followings to a rival.

On the other hand, those stars aren't necessarily adding to their benefactor’s revenue. For example, if a Vine star endorses a particular brand of clothing to all her Vine followers, Vine doesn't collect any of the money.

Historically, social media companies haven't tried to serve as middlemen for these sorts of deals because they’re too small to be worth it. There are also contracts and agents involved, which is very time-consuming and messy. The services would rather sell self-service ads through an algorithm than do handshake-driven deals between talent and brands.

That's why Facebook has a platform and an ecosystem of third-party advertising agencies that help companies advertise on Facebook. Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and others have followed this model.

By acquiring one of its ad partners, Vine is bringing that dealmaking in-house. It's a message to any other company or agency that works with Vine stars - Vine owns the transaction. Furthermore, it says Twitter is not afraid to get into the nitty-gritty act of striking deals with talent if it means making money. Further, once those sponsorship deals are done, brands can use Twitter’s ad products to promote them across the social network.

Twitter has taken criticism lately for slow growth in its active users. But the company has doubled year-over-year revenue almost every quarter since it's been public. This is another sign that Twitter is serious about proving to Wall Street that it can make a lot of money.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/11/twitter-vine-niche/feed/0Electronic cables are silhouetted next to the logo of Twitter in this illustration photo in SarajevogriffitherinSoon you’ll see Twitter ads in places other than Twitterhttp://fortune.com/2015/02/03/twitter-ads-partners/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/03/twitter-ads-partners/#commentsTue, 03 Feb 2015 23:41:59 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=974586]]>Twitter announced a partnership with two other websites Tuesday that will extend promotional tweets far beyond the Twittersphere.

Twitter's advertisers, eager to reach audiences outside of the social network, can now pay a little extra to embed promotional tweets on the mobile news app Flipboard or next to an article on Yahoo! Japan. The two participating sites have agreed to share revenue from the ads with Twitter.

"For the thousands of brands already advertising on Twitter, these new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience," wrote Twitter's Ameet Ranadive on the company's official blog, which included an example of what the embedded promotional tweets might look like:

Twitter has faced relentless pressure from shareholders to expand its user base ever since the company went public in 2013, but Tuesday's deal suggests that Twitter doesn't necessarily have to bring users to its ads -- it can just bring ads to non-users.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/03/twitter-ads-partners/feed/0461410471vernekopyNissan_Image 2How much for that Facebook fan?http://fortune.com/2015/02/03/how-much-for-that-facebook-fan/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/03/how-much-for-that-facebook-fan/#commentsTue, 03 Feb 2015 15:56:58 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=971803]]>Facebook's advertising platform, where the company FB makes almost all of its nearly $8 billion in annual revenue, is dictated by a mind-bogglingly complex auction system. But the gist is simple enough: the more desirable a demographic is for advertisers, the more it costs to target ads to that group.

Watch more about Facebook advertising from Fortune’s video team:

It's not just small fluctuations, either. If you're reading this in the United States--and especially if you're a woman--it’s likely that advertisers are spending many times more to target you than they would for other groups around the globe.

Boston ad software firm Nanigans, whose mostly e-commerce clients spend some $500 million a year on Facebook, tracks the cost for them to advertise to different markets. "There are two or three orders of magnitude difference in cost," says CEO Ric Calvillo. "You can either buy a million Malaysian users or a few thousand U.S. users."

Calvillo says that for his clients, the Facebook ad market works pretty well. Ads in Malaysia are cheap partially because e-commerce and credit card usage in the country is low relative to the rest of the world. The amount of money advertisers pay to win over a group of new users with Facebook ads, according to Nanigans data, is roughly equivalent to the amount of money those new customers will spend.

For example, ads targeting Norwegian women costs more than ads targeting almost any other group on the site, Calvillo says. But women in Norway also often tend to spend twice as much as it costs to target them. "The Norweigian female is like the brass ring of e-commerce," he said. "Whatever she costs, you should buy her."

At the other end of the scale, ads in some countries cost next to nothing--mostly places where Facebook users aren't able or particularly eager to spend big on American ecommerce sites. Thailand, where 68% of people prefer cash transactions to credit cards, and Pakistan, where Internet penetration is only 15%, are both relatively inexpensive markets.

But companies target to them, too. Calvillo says the auction price for a few of these countries seems artificially high, judging for the low spending rates on American shopping sites. "The really cheap stuff is actually not cheap enough," Calvillo says, considering the near-zero amount of revenue the bulk of those users bring in.

Why do companies bother? It’s a cheap way to buy “likes,” essentially. That can be useful if a company's lone goal is to boost its page performance statistics, perhaps as a way to impress potential investors or other customers. For some, having thousands Facebook fans in Ecuador who aren't actually interested in the business (such as a new restaurant in Schenectady) is still better than having no fans at all. Many a YouTube tutorial on getting Facebook fans for cheap can attest to its appeal.

"The reality is people also optimize for cost," Calvillo says. "They don't know what the value is they just want to get the lowest price users.” Next time you judge a site on the number of Facebook fans, check so see where they're from--some American companies are suddenly very popular in El Salvador. Money can’t buy you love, but it can still buy you a like.

A shorter version of this article appeared in the February 2015 issue of Fortune.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/03/how-much-for-that-facebook-fan/feed/0Facebook ads' cost per click (web hero)vandermyMcDonald’s fixes its marketing, Chipotle fixes its producthttp://fortune.com/2015/01/21/mcdonalds-chipotle-integrity-trust/
http://fortune.com/2015/01/21/mcdonalds-chipotle-integrity-trust/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 17:45:52 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=953910]]>During this winter’s NFL playoffs, you’ve undoubtedly witnessed a veritable blanketing of the airwaves by the McDonald’s corporation. After four straight quarters of declining sales and horrific losses of market share to competitors, the restaurant chain’s executives in Oak Brook, Ill. have gone on the offensive with a snazzy new message centered around “love.”

They’ve clearly spared no expense, with commercials during every other break and appearances from some of America’s most beloved characters--Dorothy and the Wicked Witch take a selfie, the Joker hands Batman a balloon animal, Super Mario offers a flower to the villainous Bowser, etc. And then the product push comes in: Freddy Krueger spears a handful of McNuggets for a hockey mask-clad Jason while a Packers fan hands a Bears fan a french fry. The message is that “Love is Endless” and the animation in the ads is quite beautiful.

Unfortunately, while it may temporarily juice store visits and “reposition the brand,” it does nothing to fix the underlying problems that have driven away the young parents and middle income millennials McDonald's MCD has lost. These people are not coming back so long as their perception of the food quality is poor. Ads featuring SpongeBob aren't going to cut it in the eyes of the modern consumer, who has unfettered access to nutrition data online and a consciousness about the production and retailing of the items they buy.

Frozen factory-produced meals are increasingly out of the question these days while being seen walking out of a McDonald’s has become socially unacceptable for a new generation of consumers. Last July, 30,000 consumers took part in a Consumer Reports study that ranked McDonald’s signature offering--the Big Mac--as America’s worst hamburger. McDonald’s placed 21st of 21, dead last behind burgers from Wendy’s, Burger King, White Castle, In-N-Out, Sonic, Five Guys, Jack In The Box, and every other chain you’ve ever heard of.

Against a backdrop of such devastating national perception of the company’s food, I’m not sure why an increase in ad spending would be considered a solution so long as McDonald's products remain unchanged. Naturally produced food, sold in a more pleasant environment, is what people now demand--even if it costs more and has a higher calorie count than the old fast-food experience.

The good news for McDonald’s is that another company in its industry, Chipotle Mexican Grill, may offer a solution--but only if the incumbent is willing to be bold.

This past October, McDonald’s reported a 30% plunge in net income along with a sinking revenue line. Wall Street, which had not been expecting much from the report, was shocked nonetheless. The same day, Chipotle CMG reported a 31% increase in revenue along with an incredible 57% jump in profits. It’s almost impossible not to see the almost perfectly symmetrical negative correlation between the two firms. These reports represent a sort of gastronomic yin and yang.

Of course, the comparison is somewhat unfair, given that McDonald's has a store count that's almost 10 times that of Chipotle’s in the U.S. (14,000 versus 1,500). But customer losses for McDonald’s are customer gains for Chipotle. The irony in all of this is that McDonald’s was, at one point, the parent corporation of Chipotle and had shepherded the brand from 16 stores to 500. It divested itself of the red-hot “Fresh Mexican” concept in 2006 for a tidy profit of $1.5 billion. Fast-forward less than a decade later and Chipotle is worth more than $22 billion, having more than tripled its store count while doing over $1 billion in sales per quarter.

Just as McDonald’s is out tweaking its marketing message, using Pac-Man and the Smurfs to pump up the appeal of its brand, Chipotle is concerning itself with the integrity of its product.

Last week, at approximately one third of Chipotle’s stores around the world, a sign went up in the window that read, "Sorry, No Carnitas." For the uninitiated, Carnitas is a filling for tacos and burritos comprised of pork shoulder that’s been braised and shredded, and it accounts for approximately 7% of Chipotle customers’ orders. The chain found out that one of its pork suppliers was not living up to Chipotle's “Responsibly Raised” standards. There was no rationalization or “we’ll get ‘em next time" after-the-fact justification made by the company after learning of this slip. Instead, the offending product was removed from stores immediately.

Note that this was not sub-standard or tainted meat; it was simply not in compliance with the company’s promise to its customers.

While Chipotle may take a short-term financial hit on Wall Street for living up to its “Food With Integrity” mission, the longer term benefit should become apparent immediately to anyone paying attention to consumer tastes and trends. While the Golden Arches fiddles with its marketing in an attempt to bring back the eaters who’ve been turned off by its production methods, the managers at Chipotle are moving aggressively to safeguard the customer experience itself.

The contrast in words and deeds between these two companies could not be more stark. It should be obvious which one is going to win.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/01/21/mcdonalds-chipotle-integrity-trust/feed/0McDonald's Restaurants love the worldsolster2Here’s why companies can’t say ‘Super Bowl’ in their Super Bowl adshttp://fortune.com/2015/01/20/heres-why-companies-cant-say-super-bowl-in-their-super-bowl-ads/
http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/heres-why-companies-cant-say-super-bowl-in-their-super-bowl-ads/#commentsTue, 20 Jan 2015 19:05:53 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=951613]]>This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

By Jack Linshi, TIME

By now, you've seen plenty of commercials advertising February's Super Bowl XLIX between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. But there's a second kind of Super Bowl ad you might have seen, too: the kind that isn't allowed to say "Super Bowl."

The National Football League, which has trademarked the term "Super Bowl," isn't afraid to send cease-and-desist letters to anybody using the term without permission, according to SB Nation. That means brands that aren't willing to pay the big bucks to use the term have to come up with sometimes strange alternatives instead.

The tight regulations are part of the reason why the NFL's ad space for the game is so lucrative: In 2010, Budweiser signed a six-year Super Bowl sponsorship deal worth over $1 billion, while 30-second Super Bowl ads -- which reach over 100 million viewers -- regularly sell for $4 million a pop.

In the past, the rules have led to awkward workarounds like Stephen Colbert's "Superb Owl," a tongue-in-cheek joke poking fun at the NFL's habit of tightly guarding the Super Bowl trademark:

If you're a fan of my Superb Owl coverage, tweet about it with the official hashtag, #SUPERBOWL.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/heres-why-companies-cant-say-super-bowl-in-their-super-bowl-ads/feed/0NFL products banned — Non Gatorade 2014lorenzettifortuneMcDonald’s latest recipe to reverse declining sales: More ‘lovin’http://fortune.com/2015/01/02/mcdonalds-lovin-advertising/
http://fortune.com/2015/01/02/mcdonalds-lovin-advertising/#commentsFri, 02 Jan 2015 22:07:48 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=928175]]>Following a year of slumping sales, McDonald’s is banking on the power of love to spur a turnaround.

On Friday, the fast-food mega-chain unveiled new ads that expands on the company’s decade-old “I’m Lovin’ It” slogan by highlighting the “lovin'” aspect of the campaign.

“This new focus will inspire everything we do moving forward, from advertising and marketing to how we interact with customers in restaurants and on social media,” the company said in announcing what U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Wahl calls “a brand transformation.”

The revamped marketing push follows a tough year for McDonald’s MCD during which it reported declining revenue. To reverse the slide, the company has slimmed-down what many customers said was a confusing menu while adding healthier and fresher food.

New television and online ads will begin appearing over the weekend, McDonald’s said. One new spot the company posted online features a collection of odd couples -- from a knight and a dragon to the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote -- coming together in harmony as they share a McDonald’s meal.

“Lately, the balance of lovin’ and hatin’ seems off,” Wahl said in a video posted online by the company. “Who better to stand up for lovin’ than McDonald’s? Lovin’ sits at the heart of our tagline and it sits at the heart of our business.”

There was no immediate word on how much McDonald’s will spend on the new ad campaign.

In addition, McDonald’s is hoping to build a closer relationship with customers by encouraging them to ask questions about the chain’s food. As an example of the social media campaign, the company listed this question: “What part of the chicken is a Chicken McNugget?”

“McDonald’s is moving from a philosophy of billions served to billions heard,” Wahl said in Friday’s video. She also highlighted the company’s recent efforts to scale back the size of its menu while introducing additional healthier dining options, including in its Happy Meals for kids.

The moves come as the world’s largest restaurant company faces increasingly stiff competition from other fast-food outlets as well as from a growing number of fast-casual restaurant chains. In November, McDonald’s U.S. comparable sales dropped 4.6% -- a steep decline that even surprised analysts had prepared for a dip of only 1.9%. The company’s sales numbers for December have not yet been released, but some analysts think 2014 could be the first year of negative global same-store sales for McDonald’s since 2002.

Recently, a Fortune magazine cover story outlined some of the issues that have plagued the suffering fast-food giant in recent years. Last month, McDonald’s announced it would simplify its menu, removing several items and extra value meals.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/01/02/mcdonalds-lovin-advertising/feed/0McDonalds Earnings Rise On Value MenuhuddlestontomWhat can you learn from 8 kids already making a million dollarshttp://fortune.com/2014/12/30/what-can-you-learn-from-8-kids-already-making-a-million-dollars/
http://fortune.com/2014/12/30/what-can-you-learn-from-8-kids-already-making-a-million-dollars/#commentsTue, 30 Dec 2014 17:07:41 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=925021]]>This post is in partnership with Entrepreneur. The article was originally published at Entrepreneur.com.

By John Rampton, Entrepreneur

There's no age limit when it comes to being a millionaire these days, and a handful of kids have struck it rich well before they can legally vote. They're small business owners, inventors and entrepreneurs. I started as an entrepreneur when I was around 11 years old with my first candy stand, which grew to four candy stands, but that was nothing compared to some of these kids!

There's is no age limit, either, when it comes to learning from others. These impressive kids learned from their own failures early in life but determined to keep going and to do it better the next time around. If you haven't made your first million yet, the teen next door might actually be able to teach you something.

Check out these eight kids who made a million, or more, and what you can learn from their success:

1. Evan of EvanTube

With the help of his dad, this 8-year-old launched his own YouTube channel, titled EvanTube, and rakes in about $1.3 million each year. He reviews toys, talks about things that other kids his age are into, and he's secured an audience that will grow with him. There are quite a few YouTube millionaires, so if you have the charisma to pull it off, it's a free avenue for creating your own brand. Unfortunately, few entrepreneurs have the cuteness factor of Evan on their side.

2. Christian Owens

His motivator was Steve Jobs, and that's how Owens made his first million at the age of 16. He got his own PC computer as an adolescent (soon followed by a Mac) and taught himself web design in middle school. By the age of 14, he'd started his own design company. Founder of Mac Bundle Box, he negotiated with developers and manufacturers to offer simple, discounted packages for his customers. The lesson? Follow your passions, claim your mentors and find a way to give people what they want for less.

3. Adam Hildreth

When he was just 14, Hildreth got together with friends to create Dubit--a social networking site. It was wildly popular in the UK and by his sixteenth birthday he had nearly $3.7 million in the bank. He then moved on to developing Crisp, which is a software company that helps protects kids from online predators. There's nothing wrong with jumping on a trending bandwagon, but if you want continued success then find a way to branch out from it and innovate.

4. Cameron Johnson

Johnson was asked by his parents to develop invitation cards for a neighborhood party when he was 11. The guests adored the cards and started paying him to craft their own personal use cards. He founded "Cheers and Tears" by 14, then Cameron moved on to online advertising and software development. By high school, his monthly income was around $400,000. The lesson? Do everything well and don't be afraid to try new things (or industries).

5. Geoff, Dave, and Catherine Cook

These dynamic siblings are behind, “MyYearbook,” a (still) popular social media site that's based on where you went to school. These kids had just moved to a new school and wanted to make new friends, so an online yearbook seemed like the perfect place to start. This was before Facebook was a household name. The lesson? Sometimes nepotism works, and if you find a disparity in the market, you can be the one to fill it.

6. Farrhad Acidwalla

In between attending school in Mumbai, India, this 16-year-old is the founder of Rockstah Media. It's a comprehensive marketing agency boasting 20 employees around the world. "My team is the backbone of my company," says Acidwalla. The lesson? Everyone has the same hours in the day, so if even those with limitations (like being a kid) can grow a company like this, so can you.

7. Emil Motycka

What started as a lawn mowing business when he was nine turned into Motycka Enterprises by the time he was 18. In order to keep up with all the demands of a teenager, he works the graveyard shift and says, "I sleep four hours a night on average" and call it sleep for the week. That amount of sleep might not be the best advice, but perseverance, and being willing to do what it takes to get the work done, can certainly get you to his level.

8. Ryan of "Ryan's Barkery"

One of the handful of kids featured on "Shark Tank," as an elementary school kid, Ryan raked in $25,000 for 25 percent of his business. Now Ryan is 12 years old, and is the young entrepreneur and founder of a dog treat bakery. He is building his business in an industry (pet pampering) that's recession-proof. The lesson? Find your own niche, it’s there waiting for you.

Think you're beyond the age limit to make a million? Think again. Experience and maturity come with their own benefits.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/12/30/what-can-you-learn-from-8-kids-already-making-a-million-dollars/feed/0EvanTubeHD logolorenzettifortuneHow Facebook is going to battle with YouTubehttp://fortune.com/2014/12/16/how-facebook-is-going-to-battle-with-youtube/
http://fortune.com/2014/12/16/how-facebook-is-going-to-battle-with-youtube/#commentsTue, 16 Dec 2014 14:17:49 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=906614]]>This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

By Victor Luckerson, TIME

Facebook is well on its way to developing its next big cash cow, and it has nothing to do with the social network's splashy billion-dollar purchases of messaging and virtual reality startups.

This year, the company dusted off its oft-neglected video feature and quickly made auto-playing clips ubiquitous in users' News Feeds (with a big assist from the wildly viral ALS Ice Bucket Challenge). People are now watching videos uploaded directly to Facebook one billion times per day -- and that big number is starting to whet marketers' appetites. As the social network ratchets up its plan to lure brands to place video ads on the site, its efforts could eventually threaten YouTube, which has dominated the online video space for nearly a decade.

This holiday season, Facebook FB is partnering with brands such as fashion design house Kate Spade and retailer Gap to develop targeted video ads that play automatically in users' feeds. The Kate Spade spot, a two-and-half minute short starring Anna Kendrick, has managed to rack up 1.8 million views and 49,000 likes, comments and shares since launching in November. A YouTube version of the commercial released the same day has about 150,000 views. (Facebook's view metrics automatically lean in the social network's favor because videos auto-play by default and only have to be seen for three seconds to register as a view; a Google GOOG spokesperson says a YouTube video must be watched "many times longer" to count as a view).

Kate Spade's new spot was the first time the brand used Facebook's native video player instead just posting a YouTube link onto Facebook. Chief Marketing Officer Mary Beech says the company is happy with the results, which came from a mix of paid promotion and organic sharing by users. Kate Spade now intends to launch another video ad on Facebook in the spring. "Facebook has been wonderful in terms of the shares," Beech says.

Facebook's video pitch to marketers is much the same as it's always been: thanks to the social network's massive trove of user data, Facebook believes it can show video ads to precisely those people who will be most receptive to them. "[Marketers] are looking at Facebook to deliver very personalized messages," says Nicolas Franchet, head of retail and e-commerce on Facebook's global vertical marketing team. "Video is now one of the ways they can do that."

Videos also give Facebook another key data point it can use to try to ferret out its users' intent. For example, Kate Spade was able to serve ads for certain products featured in the Anna Kendrick commercial specifically to users who saw the video. "If you've viewed a video, you've certainly formed some sort of interest in the brand and so the brand can capitalize on that," Franchet says.

While Facebook has found fast success with video, YouTube continues to lead in the space by many metrics. An analysis of 10 holiday ad campaigns by the advertising research firm Unruly found that that the commercials earned 13 million views on Facebook, but about 32 million on YouTube. The YouTube versions of the videos were also shared more across the Internet, gaining 630,000 shares compared to 530,000 shares for the Facebook versions. And in terms of raw usage, YouTube is still king--the video site had 4 billion views per day way back in 2012, compared to Facebook's current 1 billion (YouTube no longer regularly discloses overall viewcounts, but the amount of content being uploaded per minute to the site has quintupled since 2012). Compared to Facebook's videos, YouTube videos are easier to find weeks or months after they've been posted, and they're easier to embed on websites or competing social networks.

"With YouTube watch time up 50% [year-over-year] and data showing that people are watching more ads than ever, advertisers are finding that their campaigns have staying power on YouTube," a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

But Facebook's video ambitions are still young, and the company has some key advantages that previous YouTube competitors lacked. With more than 1 billion monthly users each, Facebook and YouTube already boast similar scale globally. Facebook also drives some portion of YouTube's traffic and could use its control of the News Feed to give its own videos preference over YouTube ones (Facebook videos are already the only ones that auto-play, and they appear as larger posts within the News Feed). And Facebook has reportedly been trying to use its substantial amount of cash (its annual revenue now exceeds $11 billion) to poach YouTube stars to get them to make Facebook-exclusive content.

Still, experts say the two sites currently offer different video viewing experiences. "If you go to YouTube, you're kind of in a search mode. You kind of want to sit back and watch something," says Debra Aho Williamson, a social media analyst at eMarketer "On Facebook, it's all about discovery-almost serendipity. It's kind of a different mindset."

Brands will likely continue to experiment on both platforms. Kate Spade, for instance, used portions of that Anna Kendrick ad to create pre-roll spots to place on YouTube. But with finite ad dollars available, companies will have to make a conscious decision about where they spend their online video ad money. And for the first time in a long time, the answer isn't necessarily YouTube by default.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/12/16/how-facebook-is-going-to-battle-with-youtube/feed/0113888425lorenzettifortuneFacebook just took a huge shot at Googlehttp://fortune.com/2014/12/09/facebook-just-took-a-huge-shot-at-google/
http://fortune.com/2014/12/09/facebook-just-took-a-huge-shot-at-google/#commentsTue, 09 Dec 2014 20:00:57 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=897540]]>This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

By Alex Fitzpatrick, TIME

Facebook is making a change this week that, if it works, may finally sound the death knell for Google Plus, the search giant's rival social network.

One of Facebook's biggest weaknesses is that its internal search isn't very robust. If you suddenly remembered your best friend posted about a cool new band on your wall a couple months ago and you wanted to go back and find that post, good luck. It's the exact opposite experience you might have on Google services like Gmail, which turns your inbox into a vast trove of easily-searchable info.

And that was one of the most promising things about Google Plus, when it launched three years ago: The idea that Google GOOG might turn all your online social interactions into an easy-to-search repository. From a user's perspective, that would be handy because the stuff your friends share directly with you is often more relevant to you than what you can dig up in a general web search.

But Google Plus was even more crucial from Google's perspective. With more of the content that's most relevant to us appearing on our social networks rather than the broader web, it makes sense that we might think to search on social media before we search the wider Internet. If Google didn't have an answer for that potential trend, it could result--in the very long run--in fewer people using its biggest moneymaker, search.

Search remains a vastly profitable business for Google. Revenue from Google-owned websites made up 69% of the company's total $16.52 billion in revenue for the third quarter of this year. Google doesn't break out exactly how much of that is from the ads it sells against your search results, but several estimates are in the 50% and up range. And its Android platform for cell phones has helped it lock down mobile search, an area as hot as social.

Still, Google's search business is starting to slow. And that's where Facebook FB comes in. The social network announced an improved internal search feature this week that the company promises will make it easier to find stuff our friends shared with us in the past. The search upgrade is specifically designed to work well on mobile, an area where Facebook is already considered king in terms of driving traffic.

If Facebook's new search function works well, more of its users might be inclined to search there rather than heading to Google, especially on their phones. And that would give Facebook an opening to take a run at Google's dominance in search.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/12/09/facebook-just-took-a-huge-shot-at-google/feed/0rtr4c0uzlorenzettifortuneIs Gary Vaynerchuk for real?http://fortune.com/2014/12/08/is-gary-vaynerchuk-vaynermedia-for-real/
http://fortune.com/2014/12/08/is-gary-vaynerchuk-vaynermedia-for-real/#commentsMon, 08 Dec 2014 19:49:23 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=891984]]>The judges of the 88th Miss America pageant, which was held last September in Atlantic City, were mostly names you know, people of considerable fame. They included former supermodel Kathy Ireland, NFL great and Dancing with the Stars winner Donald Driver, and Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson.

And then there was Gary Vaynerchuk. When ABC's host Chris Harrison (of Bachelor fame) introduced him--"an entrepreneur, author, and social media master"--Vaynerchuk held up his phone and mimed the act of taking a selfie.

It was a perfect (and perfectly predictable) joke at his own expense. Vaynerchuk has created two successful companies; he is a bestselling author; he can command six-figure fees for speaking engagements; and he has 1.1 million Twitter followers. But he is largely unknown to the American television-viewing public. Rather, he is Internet famous. That fame happened by design and by years of meticulous planning--and it has drawn vocal critics for a style that is loud, bombastic and blatantly self-promotional. (A sample exhortation from a video commanding people to subscribe to his YouTube channel: “Fucking follow me, right now.”)

A common line of criticism against Vaynerchuk is that he is a snake-oil salesman, one of a growing number of Internet celebrity marketers who make their money telling eager beaver entrepreneurs that they, too, can get rich and famous by self-marketing on social media. "People think I'm a hack, simply because a lot of people that were early to social media really were hacks," he told Fortune, sitting in the casino at the Borgata Atlantic City on the second night of pageant preliminaries in September. "And I get lumped in with them. But when someone says to me, 'You've only achieved this because you're big on social media,' I say, 'want to see my calendar?'"

He pulls out his phone to prove it. The calendar for the next few weekdays is jammed with meetings, meals, or phone calls--some of them one-on-one talks with colleagues, many of them fancy dinners with tech exec pals--and nary a 20-minute block open. He has a meeting scheduled for 11:30 that same night with a team of his employees, after our interview and after hours of judging the pageant prelims. "It comes from straight-up immigrant fucking hustle," he says.

But every CEO is busy. What makes Vaynerchuk fascinating is the disparity between Gary, the person, and GaryVee, the Internet persona--and the passionate reactions to the latter. The Web made Vaynerchuk, but his bluster on the Web also made him a lightning rod. A 2009 Gawker headline called him a “wine-loving Twitter twerp,” and this year its tech site Valleywag wrote, “Think of him as a sort of Deepak Chopra of selling bullshit with Snapchat.”

When he discusses his detractors, Vaynerchuk can sound like Rodney Dangerfield bemoaning the lack of respect. And yet most of the insulting tweets you find about Vaynerchuk also begrudgingly give him credit, like @BMilneSLO in 2012: “@garyvee you’re still annoying… and obnoxious… but you’re right,” or @AndersRiis the same year: “this bloke is a bit annoying to listen to, but he does have valid points on social media.” Those who complain about him tend to overlook the fact that he is already in his third--maybe fourth--successful act in business. And if the quick growth of his latest venture is any indication, the joke may be on everyone else.

—

Gary Vaynerchuk was an entrepreneur well before Twitter came along. The story is well known to those who have followed his rise: Born in Belarus, he came to the U.S. in 1978 with his parents. Raised in Edison, New Jersey, he moved back home in 1998, after college at Mount Ida in Newton, Mass., to work at his father's liquor store in nearby Springfield, which bore the unsexy name Shoppers Discount Liquors. It was an all-purpose, everyday liquor shop, like any other, but it would serve as the blank canvas for a grand experiment that would become Vaynerchuk’s talent: harnessing the Internet to build a brand.

“I know exactly when I found out about the Internet,” he says. It was 1994 and he was a freshman in college. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute. We don’t need 8,000 liquor stores. I can just build this.” Three years later in 1997, while still in college, Vaynerchuk launched WineLibrary.com, which was one of the first wine e-commerce businesses. Most wine shops didn’t yet know what the Web was for, much less sell their wares online. His father gave Gary an ad budget as well as “enormous freedom,” says Vaynerchuk. (In turn, they later renamed the store Wine Library.) Gary took advantage of new tools he had learned about, like then-burgeoning Google AdWords (which let him pay for his site to appear against searches for “wine”) as well as more traditional print, TV and radio advertising to grow the shop's annual revenues from $3 million to $45 million by 2003.

In 2006, his career took a now well-chronicled turn. Vaynerchuk launched Wine Library TV, a bare-bones web video series in which Vaynerchuk tasted and discussed wines, spitting into a New York Jets bucket. (He is a diehard fan and talks often about his ultimate goal of buying the team.) With a shaky camera and casual feel, its sole attraction was Vaynerchuk, hamming it up, blurting non-sequiturs and gesticulating wildly. The show soon went "viral," before the term became ubiquitous, drawing 100,000 views per episode at its peak. He invited guests, ranging from no-name wine experts to celebrities like Wall Street pundit Jim Cramer and hockey star Wayne Gretzky. Some in the wine world accused him of dumbing down the art of wine appreciation, but Vaynerchuk responded that he was creating new oenophiles.

Three years in, Wine Library TV was as much about Vaynerchuk as it was about wine. (The opening animation showed the pouring of a bottle labeled, “Vaynerchuk: a fine New Jersey cabernet.”) He was dispersing wisdom on much more than wine: topics like branding, career advice, and shaping an online identity. And his following on a still-nascent Twitter had grown, reaching 145,000 followers by 2009, when the service was just three years old. He had drawn so much media attention that in the same year, he inked a seven-figure, 10-book deal with HarperStudio to write business books with motivational titles like Crush It! and, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. (The HarperStudio imprint has since folded, so Vaynerchuk's fourth book, in early 2016, will be published under Harper Business.)

Along with the books came speaking engagements, still a staple of his schedule today, at which he preaches the gospel of self-branding to sellout crowds with a no-holds-barred flair that delights some and offends others. In a Q&A after a talk at the 2011 Inc. 500 seminar, when Vaynerchuk was promoting the give-and-take concept of his book The Thank-You Economy, a small-business owner in the audience asked, in an attempt to follow Vaynerchuk's own instructions about making an ask of someone, "Would you mind tweetin' about [my company] to your 900,000 friends?" The audience laughed and applauded, but Vaynerchuk shut him down: "Good hustle… but see, what I find interesting is, even though I just gave a really passionate talk, you went for the 19-year-old dude move. You tried to close on our first transaction. And so that gives you a big fucking no... You fucking blew it... Next time you go into the social media bar, don't be a douchebag, roll deep."

Vaynerchuk ended Wine Library TV in 2011 but now films regular #AskGaryVee videos (he’s up to 50 and the series just started last August) in which he answers questions (from, where else, Twitter) about career advancement and brand-building on social media. He makes other short videos and posts them to YouTube and Facebook. (One in 2012 criticized the OWN network, which asked followers to retweet an Oprah hashtag, for, “continuing to think that these [social] platforms are [there] to push down the throat of the consumer.” Nevermind that this is exactly what Vaynerchuk does.) He has 46,000 followers on Instagram, where the vast majority of his posts are selfies or selfie videos. He writes super-short posts for the blogging platform Medium (in which he is an investor) each week, with headlines like, “Some solid fucking advice,” and, “Nobody cares about your billion-dollar idea.” He posts earnest, yet shameless traffic pleas to Facebook like this one, from November: "Curious question--are you sub'd for my YT channel? If not would mean a lot to me."

Becoming a social media guru and self-stylized branding expert (of which there are now hordes) led to riches and renown, but also the aforementioned criticism. The Wall Street Journal called him "continually overexposed." The New York Times called him a “tireless self-promoter.” (Even internally at Fortune, in brainstorm meetings discussing candidates for our annual 40 Under 40 list, initial mention of Vaynerchuk yielded eye-rolls.)

Nonetheless, the notoriety served as a steppingstone to launching VaynerMedia, a digital agency, with his brother AJ in 2009. "Vayner," as employees and industry peers call it, advises brands on Vaynerchuk's field of mastery: how to take advantage of social media. While big PR agencies have long offered social media as one of many services, Vayner focuses on it, counseling clients to shift much more of their marketing budgets to social media efforts. That argument has wooed big Fortune 500 names like GE, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and Unilever.

Vaynerchuk believes VaynerMedia’s success has also helped change the minds of some of his critics. "I’m excited because this company has completely confused the market," he says. "When I first started it, everyone was like, 'Oh, Mr. A-lot-of-Twitter-followers thinks he can compete in this world.' And we’ve not only competed, we will be considered a new standard." He compares his firm’s potential to other big marketing agencies like AKQA and Digitas: "We're going to be that, for the social generation. We are the winner of that game." And, he points out--albeit in trademark GaryVee language--that this side of his story has nothing to do with his persona or charisma: "I’ve put my head down and I’ve grinded the shit out of it operationally," he says.

Industry peers at other agencies don't necessarily agree that VaynerMedia is a new paradigm. Curtis Hougland, founder of digital marketing agency Attention, says that more and more brands these days are skipping the agency model and taking their social media marketing in-house. Many that do hire firms like Vayner, he says, do it out of fear--they don’t quite “get” social media marketing, so they just farm it out. But Hougland also gives Vaynerchuk a lot of credit. “He has to be loud to stand out, and he’s not wrong to do that,” he says. “He represents shameless promotion, the guy who will say the things that you might hesitate to… But that’s really, really popular, and it’s easy to understand. It’s like pop music.”

An executive at another rival digital agency, who wished to remain anonymous, thinks a big part of VaynerMedia's draw is the mystique around Vaynerchuk: "It's like people who go to see a fortuneteller," he says. "They walk out saying, 'Oh my god, I believe.' Because they walked in wanting to believe." And he wonders if the guru gets in his own company’s way: "If I'm a client, I'm like, 'I'm paying you to run my brand, but you're also busy elevating your brand, and writing your books.'"

B.J. Mendelson, a fellow Internet personality and a vocal critic of Vaynerchuk, says his main complaint--one that has been raised by others--is the potential conflict of interest created by Vaynerchuk's personal technology investments. He was an early investor in Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr (as well as Birchbox, Circa, HubSpot, Uber and Quirky, all household names) and now runs a digital agency that urges brands to utilize those platforms. To be fair, those are the same obvious platforms any digital agency would advocate for. But Mendelson sees it as disingenuous. "This guy is peddling stuff he has an interest in," he says.

Vaynerchuk has heard it all before. He says that all clients are made aware of his investment interests. And besides, he reasons, these companies are at such a huge scale that VaynerMedia's involvement is not going to affect them much one way or another. (Moreover, what social media consultant would not suggest having a brand presence on Twitter and Facebook?)

And he insists that VaynerMedia is bigger than just him. He says many of the young applicants that come in for job interviews haven't heard of him at all when they apply. Besides, it’s difficult to believe that mystique alone has drawn not only Fortune 500 corporate clients but also 420 employees to come on board.

One thing that's indisputable is that Vaynerchuk's personality infuses the strong culture at VaynerMedia. A wall of the New York offices reads, "We love social media because it sells shit." Employees refer to the CFO as the "CFBro." In one corner is a vending machine with Vaynerchuk's face on it, labeled "Gary Venderchuk." There are knick-knacks and tchotchkes all over the place, and the majority of employees, more than half of which are millennials, do not have designated desks--they shuffle around every day. (The New York employees will eventually relocate to Hudson Yards, where VaynerMedia has just purchased 90,000 square feet of office space.)

And while many of VaynerMedia's employees work like traditional agency folks, managing accounts for brand clients, a number of them work exclusively for Brand Gary, as opposed to the agency. At the office in New York, Vaynerchuk sits in a glass-walled room where he has people filming him throughout the day. It feels almost like a Damien Hirst installation. One of his team members, Steve Unwin, describes his own job thusly: "I touch all of Gary's content--not the tweets, he does that himself, but the longform stuff, the blog posts. I tend to translate him into English." Another, Mike Boyd, left the company to start his own music management company but still does paid work in the music business for Vaynerchuk, who is also now an investor in his company. Boyd says he was originally hired “specifically to build relationships in the music industry for Gary."

Many of those relationships are beneficial to Vayner clients. Boyd helped hook up Avion tequila, a VaynerMedia client, with Young Jeezy, who has pumped the brand on social media. And Boyd says that when his own client Rome Fortune, a budding rapper, “becomes the next big artist brands want to get to,” VaynerMedia’s clients will have the first crack.

More generally, Vaynerchuk dismisses the refrains of his haters simply by saying his track record speaks for itself. And it does. With one $60 million-in-sales company under his belt, and now another that is approaching the same size (VaynerMedia says it did $23 million in revenue in 2013), he reasons that he is someone who has "done it," rather than talked about doing it.

"When I'm put in the ground, what I'll feel good about is the two businesses I made,” he says. “Show me who else did that."

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/12/08/is-gary-vaynerchuk-vaynermedia-for-real/feed/0Gary Vaynerchuk tailgates with friend at the Jets game September 7, 2014DBRFiat embraces its ‘Fix It Again, Tony’ problem with humorhttp://fortune.com/2014/12/02/fiat-fix-it-again-tony/
http://fortune.com/2014/12/02/fiat-fix-it-again-tony/#commentsTue, 02 Dec 2014 12:00:51 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=886619]]>Few American motorists realize that Fiat is an acronym, much less that it stands for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino. If they think acronym at all, it's "Fix It Again, Tony," a derisive reference to the Italian automaker's legendary reputation for substandard quality.

Which wouldn't matter, except that Fiat Chrysler Automobile N.V. FCA is toiling hard to revive the brand in the U.S. following a 25-year hiatus.

FCA began importing its sarcastically tiny Fiat 500 minicar to the U.S. in 2007 to mostly respectful reviews and tepid sales. Since then the automaker has added souped-up versions, slightly larger versions and now the 500X, a mini-SUV based on original. The time clearly has arrived to improve quality, and perhaps address the "Fix It Again, Tony" disgrace.

Olivier Francois, FCA's marketing chief for Fiat and Chrysler, said at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November: "We need to let our customers know that FIAT--NOW--has a perfect fit for America," the 500X.

To underscore the point that Fiat is a "sexy" and legitimate brand, Francois has decided to take on the brand's baggage directly, hiring Wieden & Kennedy to produce "Fix It Again, Tony." In the witty and engaging video, a squad of Italian mechanics "fix" a Honda Civic with a broken mirror by turning the vehicle into a new 500X.

The mechanics speak in fractured English and offer to make the owner of the Civic an espresso while he waits for the repair.

As Francois remarked about the 84-second video: "Really, it doesn't just feature a new car, it features a skeleton. The skeleton in the closet, the elephant in the room. His name was Tony, and he had to go." He noted that the Melfi, Italy plant where the 500X is built has been redesigned. The vehicle embodies 2.5 million hours of engineering and three million miles of testing, he said.

In terms of comparators, Fiat still brings up the rear in terms of quality ratings - which doesn't mean that its quality isn't sufficient to attract buyers.

Through October, Fiat's U.S. sales topped 39,000 up 7.7% compared with the first ten months of last year. Fiat returned to the U.S. in 2009, following Chrysler's bankruptcy, after exiting the market in 1983, part of a multi-prong strategy to join Fiat Chrysler into a global automaking enterprise. In the past year, FCA also reintroduced Alfa Romeo, FCA's European luxury brand to the U.S.

Francois and FCA haven't said whether "Fix It Again, Tony" will be aired on television. For now the automaker is satisfied to disseminate the video on social media and gauge the reaction. One potential trouble spot is the video's potential propagating an anti-Italian ethnic slur. Another is the video's insinuation that Honda sells boring cars that needs to be fixed.

The subcompact SUV segment is very hot in the U.S. and worldwide, providing lots of shoppers as well as lots of competition for 500X. My guess is that Tony will soon be playing to bigger audience on the wide screen.

The self-styled King of Beers is reportedly reworking its marketing campaign in a bid to remain relevant as craft beers capture the attention of drinkers.

The company is looking to stem the falling sales of its title offering -- and is turning to younger drinkers for its best chance, banking on a new advertising campaign to bring that strategy to the market, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The new commercials that focus exclusively on the 20-something age bracket this holiday season. A new ad campaign will feature young drinkers answering the question: “If you could grab a bud with any of your friends these holidays, who would it be?”

That will lead the way for the brand’s bigger marketing push, which includes food festivals and a two-day concert in partnership with Jay Z in Philadelphia that was started in 2012.

Budweiser has faced declining demand over the past 25 years. In 1988, the brand sold about 50 million barrels, but last year that dropped to 16 million barrels, the Journal says. Part of that decline is its own brand cannibalism: Bud Light has pulled away customers from Budweiser for decades and became the nation’s No. 1 selling beer in 2001.

Budweiser’s appeal is particularly dismal among young drinkers in the U.S. Nearly 44% of drinkers aged between 21 and 27 have never tried Budweiser, according to the brand’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD.

If Budweiser can gain the 20-something appeal, it has access to the biggest number of new drinkers since the baby boom. The number of people turning 21 peaked in 2013 at about 4.6 million.

Clydesdales have featured in many Budweiser ad campaigns and have been associated with the beer company since 1933, when Budweiser introduced them to celebrate the repeal of Prohibition for beer, the AP said.

Editor's note: Following the publication of this article, Budweiser issued a statement in which it said the beer company's famous Clydesdale horses will, in fact, be featured in next year's Super Bowl advertising and are also part of upcoming responsible holiday drinking advertising.